The next time they ate together he asked if she would find a newspaper for him. She had wondered when he might make such a request, when he would want to look out further than the room, the house (no spyglass now) and she knew where she would go. Not to the parson, who would make a great show of being disturbed, but to a farmer called Nicholls who had taught himself to read as a young man and now had a modest library of his own. His farm was a mile off and she walked through a wind scented with snow. When she arrived at the farm she found one of the Nichollses’ boys standing with a pail in the midst of a crowd of pigs. He pointed with his chin to the house where she found the farmer drinking tea and taking his ease at a table that once, perhaps, had been a door.

“I am,” said the farmer, holding up a volume about the size and thickness of an eating apple, “reading the words of a man who walks all over the country.”

“He must know things then,” said the housekeeper.

“It could be,” said the farmer, “that a man standing still knows just as much and will have his boots less worn. The world will pass through him.”

She asked if he had a paper and he called to his wife to ask if she had seen the Examiner, then found it himself, underneath a sleeping cat. When he gave it to the housekeeper it was still warm.

“For John Lacroix, I suppose.”

“It is,” she said.

“Has he had enough of fighting?” asked the farmer.

“I can’t say,” said the housekeeper. “He has not said one way or the other.”

“There’s a great many young men in a great hurry to die,” said the farmer. His middle son had taken the bounty and was serving in America.

“There’s a great many as are doing their duty,” said the housekeeper. She respected the farmer but she was not afraid of him.

“Strange duty killing men whose names you do not know.”

“Would it be better,” asked the housekeeper—it was, in fact, a question—“to know their names?”

“Knights used to know each other’s names. I used to know the name of every man at market. Now I know half at best.”

“You live in your books,” she said.

He nodded and took up the book again, as if she had reminded him. “It may be,” he said, as she turned to leave, “he’ll go back to music. John Lacroix. I think that it suited him. Did it not? Music?”